


Just One Person Is Missing And Your World Is A Vast Wasteland

by Shatteeran



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst with a fluffy ending, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, How is this not a tag yet?, Hurt Niall, Hurt/Comfort, In a very background kinda way, M/M, Niall Needs To Use His Words, Niall-centric, Niam Actually, Oblivious Liam, Pining Liam, Pining Niall, Sad Niall, Somebody stahp meh!, The Break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-08-11 21:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7907911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteeran/pseuds/Shatteeran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After The Break, there's something amiss in Niall's life, something he's grown accustomed to without even noticing. And the less he's willing to figure it out, the more he's obsessed about it. </p><p>Or</p><p>The one where Liam's absence in Niall's life leads him to discover - and eventually confess - his feelings towards his best friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just One Person Is Missing And Your World Is A Vast Wasteland

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, alright.   
> I know it's not my best work.
> 
> But (like usual), the idea came to me and it got my fingers moving for hours (though it's so short) until it was done. Now that I got my life again... I'm not even sure what story I was exactly trying to tell, so more than ever, I'm really curious about what you will find in these poor lines.
> 
> Shamefully posting it here because I still got feels while editing. And because Niam's my OTP and needs all the updates in the world - even the one that it does not deserve.
> 
> If you're, by chance, also a reader of Somebody Shine A Light, I'm most definitely still working on it. But feel free to complain. It feels like a kiss :)

The thought had struck him in the middle of a sentence. Half-sat on his mother’s kitchen stool, elbows resting on the countertop, he was retelling vividly a couple of anecdotes from the infinite list of events and endeavors he’d been attending and tending to since The Break. He was not certain what he had wanted to speak about, really. There was some news about the youngest Tomlinson being a cute baby, probably a picture or two from Harry’s movie he was saving for later, but… All Niall could remember with precision was that he had wanted to add something about Liam. Something mundane. Something insignificant. And then the thought had pounced and had taken hold of his brain, his tongue, his whole body.

His mouth had remained comically opened on the ‘a’ sound of Liam. He had dropped his traitorous spoon in his cereals, splashing milk on the grey marble – and a little bit on his black shirt. Maura had quit her task of rinsing the zucchinis to walk and sit next to her son. They had not lived together for years but mothers knew when shit got serious. And Niall was known to usually be able to handle his.

“Something wrong, Ni’?” she asked as she distractedly passed her hand in his hair to rearrange it.

The young man did not reply immediately, racking through his memories to catch a story, an action, a word from Liam worth sharing. In vain. And the thought, THAT thought, bothered him immensely. Obviously, Niall knew the four of them had gone their own way for the sole purpose of discovering who they were and what they wanted to become; he had not anticipated, as their hobbies and works and social networking pulled them in all but One Direction and away from one another, that it would itch him to know whether they were happy or sad or frustrated or excited, that it would taste sour in his mouth to talk about others than them, that it would hurt his ears to listen to silence when he was so used to ear constant jokes and pranks. But how he could explain all of that to his mum when he was so strongly opposed to examining his feelings any further?

“I just miss them, I guess.” he said, shrugging before he fixed his blonde hair the way he liked. He was a grown-up now, dammit.

“Oh Niall! It’s okay to miss your best friends after spending so much time together.” she sighed as she grabbed his neck and pressed his head in the crook of her neck in the exact same manner she had soothed a fifteen year old Niall when he had initially believed his adventure on the Xfactor had stopped before it had even started.

“Especially Liam”, she added after a thought, “you two were always attached at the hip.”

He smiled, hidden from the world, and allowed himself a couple of minutes to mope. Then he kindly untangled himself from her embrace, joyful expression back in place on his face.

“I sure don’t miss Louis’ sweaty feet, though. Nor Harry’s random nakedness.” he snickered.

“I’m sure you don’t.” she offered.

They both pretended he believed her and safely returned to their tasks of cleaning veggies and eating cereals, all things well and happy again in the world. Except the annoying thought never really vanished. It hung over his shoulder when he called Liam a couple days later because he was on his way to L.A. for “business he did not want to delve into as nothing was too definitive just yet”. It flew right alongside him across the Atlantic Ocean the following week. It, yeah, sat on his luggage nagging at him and mocking his tired blue eyes when Liam met him at the airport to pick him up.

“So, how’s everything?” he fired as soon as Liam had stepped out of their hug. “How is rooming with Cheryl? You look good, how does it feel to live somewhere the sun actually shine more than three hours a day? Is your dog well-behaved already?”

Niall was determined to put an end to the ever-growing urge to feel close once more to his bandmates. It could not be early enough. The questions ceased as they rushed out of the restricted areas of the airport to his car through the doors, intently focused on not being recognized. The car was barely moving that the blonde singer was back on tracks.

“Did you managed to find the missing rhyme for your lyrics? I searched a bit after we ended the call but all I could come up with was ‘bra’ and ‘zebra’.”

Liam spared a second of looking at the road ahead to shoot him a look, his eyes crinkled and shining with contentment.

“I’ve missed you, too, Nialler”, he simply teased.

The thought sneered from its place on the back seat. Niall’s feelings towards it changed from annoyance to anguish as it morphed into a new idea, settling between the realization of “not them, him” and “stay in my life, please”. He shushed his inner thinking before it could form the word he was scared to discover. There was no jumping out of his train of thoughts this time around, though. The little bastard had called for backup. Before the week had come and gone, Niall had silently admitted to himself his – teeny tiny, absolutely small, totally passing – crush towards his best friend.

Just a confused mumbo-jumbo of loneliness mixed with codependency and nothing to worry about.

Consequently, Niall had left the States without breathing a word of it to Liam – even less to Cheryl – and with a new resolution: the exact opposite of his previous one. He had busied himself in golf and had worked on his solo album; he had briefly answered his mate’s calls and occasionally had texted back; he had gone to great lengths to distance himself from them – from him –, to be honest with himself and to keep himself and that monster of a thought in check, all the while achieving to remain his cheerful and down-to-Earth self. He got to the point where he was feeling pretty good about himself and his progress, if he said so himself.

Confident enough that he made the mistake of attending a New Year’s Eve party in London. Confident enough that he did not recoil when Harry cornered him at 1 am with a bottle of scotch and the excuse of catching up. By the time the not so innocent questions popped up, they had drunk two thirds of the bottle and the alcohol in his system had rendered them both pliant and weirdly introspective. They were slouching against one another on the floor of the balcony when the thought sprung back from whatever hole it had been hiding inside till now.

“Y’know”, Niall started, in one of these moments when booze-flavored honesty bubbled through the buzz. “Do you think I talk about Liam too much?”

“S’okay, Nialler”, Harry reassured amiably. “He’s your best friend.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

“I know, I know”, Harry conceded. “Just not the same. Liam’s special, heh?”

“Yeah”, Niall softly agreed. “He’s just”, he continued. “Special”, he finished lamely.

Harry hummed. A breeze delicately danced through the white curtains behind them and blew back out, bringing to their noses a faint smell of chocolate and dry white wine. Stars were probably shining above them but they would not have been able to spot them with so much light pollution around the building.

“So, why did you pull away?”

The reproach rang in the air between them like a whiplash. Like always with Harry, denial was pointless. Too much carefulness was enveloped in his tone for evasion to be effective at all. So Niall rambled as he struggled to justify his decisions.

“Wasn’t going to do anything ‘bout it. Just a misdirected crush, is all. ‘M just afraid to fall off the loop. Out of your lives. Liam’s. Like you said, he’s special. I missed him, I guess.”

“I am sure he misses you too.”

“Not the same”, Niall corrected stubbornly. “Thought it was just me wanting to know how you were doing, if you were okay, at first. But…”

He took a deep breath before he let go. Screwed for screwed.

“It’s the new things I miss the most. Like this new joke I’ve learnt, this new song that just played on the radio. Commenting games on the telly. Important things. Picking songs for the album. Silly stuff. Choose a new couch and chairs for the living-room. Perfect trade-off between functional so you can eat when you have guests and comfortable when you need to laze around all day and classy for when you run towards the stairs when you bring a girl home. Go to a game. It’s like… M’okay with being a solo artist. I am, Haz, for real. But it’s something I want to do with him. Backpacking in Yosemite Park. Give a chance at the new Harry Potter movie, even though it’ll suck. Decide it’s time to throw out that CRAZY MOFOS t-shirt because I’ve worn it so much. I can do all these things on my own now that we’re… But I want to do them with him.”

“Grow old and wrinkly?” Harry asked after so long that Niall had almost fallen asleep.

Silence followed his friend’s last nudge, and Niall noticed the thought was no longer poking at him. Finally.

“That’s the most beautiful declaration of love I can think of”, Haz commented, sounding awestruck, and the blonde could not bear to look at him.

Love? Of course, he was in love. And alone, oh so alone.

Haz, being the ever-loyal friend and extraordinary individual he never ceased to be, kept Niall’s confession for him, not even bringing it up by text in the morning to assure Niall of his discretion. He also gave his Irish friend some time and space to lick his wounds and hopefully mend his heart, which Niall used to dive even more into his career.

Before he’d known it, seven more months had passed, he was working on his second album, for the first time since their beginnings musing about unrequited love and raining skies over saddened shoulders; he had also launched an association to help out bullied – especially online – teenagers, owning the hardships and hate he had had to go through before his cheeky and no-nonsense behavior won over the world; and he had steered clear of any girlfriend rumor.

A whole year since The Break and Niall, more accomplished than ever before, dragged his broken heart along with every act of kindness and word of wisdom he tried to provide to make up for the guilty truth that he wished his best friend for himself, for Liam to be into him as much as Niall loved the lad. He had broken ties with his former bandmates as well, blaming it on the boom of Harry’s acting career and on the exhausting and heart-wrenching trial Louis went through to keep the custody of his son. The irony of the situation was not lost on him: how, to preserve himself, he had accomplished the fate he had been so shocked about when it had first knocked on the edge of his consciousness all those months ago in his mother’s flat. Perhaps, because he was so convinced that he had seen the worst of it all, that now would be the starting point of healing, destiny – or the Thought or fate or whatever, he did not care to give it a name anymore – threw him a last curve.

A rainy Sunday evening Niall spent dozing off on his freshly-bought couch, his beer getting lukewarm on the coffee table, a timid but sharp knock pulled him out from his slumber. When he had moved in, he’d given his closest friends a key so they could go through the fenced gates without being bothered by amassing crowds just so they could drop in unexpectedly, any time they’d like, for all time’s sakes. At the time, Liam had insisted he would always knock anyways, just because he liked to be welcomed in; they all had teased him, knowing he was rather very conscious about overstepping said welcome.

And when Niall opened the door, here Liam stood, puppy eyes and pouty lips, two pieces of luggage neatly placed on both his sides. The whole scene was drenched with spring downpour and misery. They remained silent for a few seconds, words useless between them even after a long time apart. Then the blonde moved aside to let his best friend in and immediately put water to boil. He came back in the living-room, to a shivering Liam now in boxer shorts, with a heavy blanket that the brunet wordlessly wrapped around himself. He snuggled in the couch with a relieved sigh, closed his eyes and did not bulge until the Irish set two of his famous spiked herbal teas.

“So, what happened, mate?” Niall finally started in order to get the ball rolling.

Liam poured his heart out to the hypnotic beat of water droplets banging against the roof. Niall listened, sad, as the other described how, with so much more time on his hands, he had been persuaded his relationship was to last. How badly his newest failure at incarnating the perfect boyfriend hurt. How he was doomed to a life of loneliness, getting a new dog out of each of his mockery of relationships, until he would be too broken and drained to attract anyone anymore. Niall clenched his teeth and listened and bit his tongue. Eventually, when his guest fell asleep on the couch, he quietly slid towards his bedroom.

He didn’t close an eye that night, but he felt proud of the way he had handled the situation. And he would continue to be the friend Liam needed as long as he would need one. The blonde could do it. He could. And soon enough, the Wolverhampton boy would want to spend some time home to deal with his breakup in private, anyways.  Yeah, Niall could totally wing it.

Only, Liam didn’t leave. And when, by the end of the second day, it became painfully clear to Niall that his crush was settling in for a second night at his place, he instantly had to deal with a second intrusive roommate: that monster of a thought he had engineered against himself all those months ago. The worst part of it was that Liam never mentioned Cheryl again: for all intent and purposes, they traveled on the road again, two souls pursuing together their dream late into the night and in the am. Actually, he looked calmer and happier with every day passing by while Niall dealt with his feelings eating at him in the pit of his stomach and the ever-present shadow whispering sickeningly sweetly in his ear and taunting him with everything Liam. The more Liam thrived in his new-found haven, the more Niall felt trapped in hell. He increasingly pretexted to have meetings for work, which he got home from increasingly late and passably drunk, greeting his guest with barely a couple of words and matching with brooding silence every act and every word of affection.

It eventually came to a head on the eighth or ninth day after Liam’s arrival. The Irish arrived at his flat to find the luggage neatly placed in the middle of his living-room, Liam sitting on a chair facing the door.

“I almost left in the middle of the afternoon, but I’m not sure you would have even noticed”, he snarled instead of the warm “welcome home” he had gotten Niall accustomed to.

Niall shrugged. Shards of his broken hearts pierced through his lungs. He could not get his breathing under control. He turned to make to his room.

“I see. I’ll see you”, he answered flatly. “It was good to have you here. You’re always welcome at my place.”

His voice rang out monotone, robotic almost. The devil on his shoulder repeated he should have enjoyed their shared time while it would last. Fool! Now he would have regrets on top of remorse. The walk up the stairs seemed dreadful.

“Was it, Niall? Because you’ve served me every and any excuse to get rid of me since the day I got here. What’s it with you?” Liam shot back as he stomped behind him.

“With me? You’ve been crashing uninvited at my place for more than a week because you can’t get your head out of your arse, and I’m the one with a problem?”

Niall’s anger grew and burst out of him without warning, the pent up days of frustration finally getting the better of him. Never before had they had a fight, despite all the crises and exhausting time they had gone through together. His soul bled with despair and love. He thought for a second he’d let everything go… Before Liam pulled him right back into their argument.

“Do you have something you’d like to say to me, Niall?” he seethed. “Go on then! Spit it out at last!”

“You’re codependent.” the host yelled. “Dammit, Liam! One girlfriend drama after another because you won’t let them breathe, because you want it all right away and you don’t spare a second figuring out if you are compatible in anything. And each time, I have to run on call to comfort your sorry arse. Just let go! Life is a lonely path. Get used to it and get the fuck out my flat!”

Hurt flashed in Liam’s eyes and his attitude deflated. Niall added some self-hate in the already almost full pot of shame hanging over his head. How could they conclude like this? With shouted words that talked more about himself than they would ever mean anything about Liam. The blonde was about to break in a thousand pieces. He dragged himself towards the lobby and opened his flat door with flourish. His best friend grabbed his luggage and passed the door.

Before Niall could slam it behind him, the singer faced him, his expression unreadable. He spoke as if he was already very far away and Niall’s gut twisted at each movement of his lips.

“Hey, Nialler. Think we have reached this point where we cannot turn back, yeah? So if all is said and done, there is one more thing I want to tell you so please listen to my whining some more, okay? Erm… How do I start this? Cheryl broke up with me…”

“So you’ve said. If you intend to get into another rant…”

“…Because, she said, I was depressing as fuck” Liam plowed on, volume increasing to cut Niall off. “Apparently, I spent most of my days moping because I lived so far away from my friends and family. And apparently, all I did when we were together was talking about my friends here. Actually, no, that’s incorrect. About you. She dumped my ‘sorry arse’ because I wouldn’t stop talking about you.”

Niall gaped. Niall stared. He asked.

“What?”

“And so when it ended, you were the only person I wanted to see and be around to. And I came here and I hoped… I don’t know what I hoped. Half-hoped. That I would never have to leave. It doesn’t feel right when we don’t spend all of our time together. But, Nialler, if you are done with…”

“I love you.” Niall blurted out.

“What did you say?”

“I’m in love with you, Liam.” Niall clarified, scrutinizing his friend’s face, wishing to detect there any kind of elation. He would settle with a positive reaction, frankly. But the poker face stayed in place, all emotions safely guarded within.

“How do you mean?” the brunet dared to ask.

“What do you think?” Niall snapped, slightly annoyed again. “I mean, love, like I want to spend all my time with you, too. And really, is it that complicated to put into words in the first place? But I also mean like I wanna kiss you, hug, touch. And nibble. And lick. And bite. And suck. Hickes for starters. But then…”

“Wait wait wait, Nialler!” Liam interrupted yet again. “You want me?”

“Yes!” the blonde shouted exasperated.

“Oh.”

Liam methodically carried his luggage back, took the door of his best friend’s hand to carefully close it, then proceeded to shove him against the wall and kiss the hell out of him. Niall’s first reaction was to pull him close and grab him like a lifeline. The kiss turned out to be all he had ever wanted: Liam’s lips soft and plush, his tongue warm, his chest flat and hard against his. He realized only now how much he loved and longed for the boy’s smell. Soon enough though, he gently pushed him back.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Liam? Because it’s for keeps, I know this is new I won’t know how to go back.”

“New?”, Liam questioned. “How long?”

“A year or so. I told Harry at New Year’s. But I think it’s sort of always been here, y’know, building up.”

Liam chuckled.

“Have you paid attention during my interviews and concerts at all?  he teased. “You’re my favorite person in the world. It’s always been you, Nialler. I would have been happy with your friendship all my life. But if you’re willing to add more into the deal, I’m willing to consider it” he finishes with a smirk.

Niall’s signature smile formed on his lips, blinding. Liam clearly struggled to prevent himself from kissing it brighter.

“I think I have a couple of ideas to sweeten the pot” he joked, before leaning in to kiss him again.

“Good!” Liam added when they came up for oxygen. “Because you have two hundred and thirteen days of hell without you to make up with. And I already deducted the last eight, though they really shouldn’t count”, he ended with a frown. “Louis is gonna be so angry.”

“Why?” Niall asked before kissing his boyfriend again.

“Harry is also the one I told.”

Being fervently kissed while laughing out loud proved challenging but Niall’s best friend managed just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr : shatteeran.tumblr.com
> 
> Come say hi and we can bet on where "Niall And The Potatoes" will start their tour!


End file.
